Seriously. Many ingredients are different depending on if they’re packed, scooped, or sifted. 1 cup of brown sugar can be very different than another cup.
I tried this with cocoa powder before, as I've seen some people in cooking videos shake the cocoa in the cup, and shake the cup to flatten it. And others scoop the cocoa with a spoonand flatten it with the spoon to fill the cup.
The second method yielded over 1.6 times the amount of cocoa powder!
That's not even a real measurement. 1 what? Also, grams works just fine as a measurement. Many recipes in other countries use exclusively grams.
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash. But it would life changing if woodworking switched to metric. Doing any sort of exact math is annoying as hell. What is 12’7” divided by 4? How many 1/8” is 0.55 inches?? It is my own personal hell.
It's also a lot easier to multiply and divide recipes if you switch it over to metric. This is particularly useful if you don't have enough of one ingredient and need to reduce the others by that ratio.
Then there's the ability to measure the ingredient directly out of the container, using any scoop you can find, rather than needing multiple sets of measuring spoons.
Say you have a recipe that takes three eggs but you only have two. Do you wanna do the math on what 2/3 of one cup is actually?
Ummm... It's 2/3 cup, and that is a standard measurement. But maybe that wasn't the best example. Let's say 2/3 of 1/4 cup. Well that's 2/12 or 1/6 cup which is far from common. However a cup is 48 tsp, so 1/6 cup is 8 tsp.
I mean it's dumb as hell but it does work.
The Metric system is easier though.
It's like when the crazy guy says it's easy and then pulls out a pinboard with pictures and string connecting them and proceeds to explain how it makes sense in his head and you have to admit that you sort of follow but also can't believe what you're hearing is reality.
The thing that drives me bonkers is that ounces is both a volume and mass measurement, and they aren't the same for water.
Interestingly chicken size is based on their weight... So a size 18 chicken is a 1.8kg chook
Reminds me of the good old days when my dad raised free range fowl: the chickens were the size of turkeys and the turkeys were too big to even fit in the oven 😂
Sometimes I buy liquid eggs in a carton if I need a lot of eggs for one recipe and don't feel like cracking a dozen eggs. One large egg is about 50g, so 0.8 metric eggs is about 40g.
A metric egg is a little over 50 grams. You typically get a bit over 30 grams of white, 20 grams of yolk and 5-ish grams of shell.
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash.
Uh, you know metric has volume measurements as well, and Imperial has weight measurements? Measuring cup vs scales is not really a difference in metric and imperial.
Directions and nutrition information and other stuff like that tend to use mass for metric and volume for imperial. Yeah, you can convert stuff, but it's annoying.
It's not often you get a recipe telling you to add 300ml of oil. But it sounds like a recipe I want to try.
Only at sea level. Cooking with metric in the Himalayan mountains would not allow for this conversion.
+1 point to imperial /s
I get around it by just working in inches entirely. If some guy needs the foot-and-inch measurement I'll convert but generally calling for something to be 97 5/8" is sufficient, without needing to add feet into the equation.
I do agree that metric would be interesting. I have a metric tape measure I use when I am practicing botany so I can work on familiarizing myself with common metric distances like 10/100cm
Fun probably-already-known fact: NASA accidentally destroyed a $200 million Mars orbiter from of a missed imperial->metric conversion, because NASA does generally work in metric, and some Lockheed-Martin software provided numbers in imperial (while claiming to be metric)
Didn't you see the meme: "There are 2 types of countries, those that ise the metric system and those that landed on the moon."?
It's also usually shared by the same idiots that don't realise that barley corn is an actual measurement in their beloved imperial system.
Ask any of these smart arses how barley corns are in a foot or how many feet are in a mile and suddenly you hear excuses. Not to forget that the inch defined by the meter.
I'm not sure what your point is? Some people not knowing a certain obscure unit of measurement doesn't discount an entire system of measurements. Also your mile example doesn't make sense because most people do know how many feet are in a mile.
You're proving my point exactly. The imperial system is so convoluted that even people that INSIST that EVERYONE should use it, don't understand its units.
Just because most people don't have to deal with a certain conversion, doesn't mean that none do. There are enough engineers that design stuff which is related to problems on these variations in scale. They waste hours in productivity in needlessly complicated conversions (because fractions). Not to mention the mistakes that get introduced like the famous Mars lander that crashed because of imperial unit conversions.
Not only are the units incredibly inconsistent, you also have the issue that Brits and boat people use variation of some of the same units. US Gallons vs British Gallons, mile vs nautical mile. MPH, vs knots. That barley corn that Holzkohlen mentioned defines shoe sizes, unless of course, you don't wear shoes.
You have no point to prove! You're just ranting like a crazy person about stuff no one's heard of that doesn't even matter!
It's so nice the US and Liberia are the only two countries to share both Ebola AND the imperial system. They're buddy buddy.
Myanmar uses imperial as well. At least partially. Or they did when I visited there a few years ago.
Oh I thought they converted. Or were converting. I don't think they had Ebola though.
TBF in practice a lot of countries use the imperial system, from Canada to the UK to Jamaica to the Philippines. They just “use metric” on paper.
Also, here in the Netherlands we use inches for screen sizes and cups for some cooking recipes. I will insist that my monitor is 55cm and even tech people ask me how much that is with full sincerity.
I noticed some Canadians seem to use metric exclusively, while others very much use imperial systems through and through. Android defaults to imperial systems when it's set to Canadian English, which confuses me even more but I suppose imperial must be used a lot, then
@lord_ryvan @BonesOfTheMoon, I don't understand how it can be in the 21st century that a system as idiotic and archaic as the imperial one continues to be used. NASA has already caused millions of dollars in damage by crashing several probes due to miscalculations with these outdated and devoid of any logic measurements, based on parts of the body of a king, dead centuries ago instead of clear physical and mathematical units as in the rest of the world.
I find stuff like cups and spoons and pounds and inches are used here more than metric, but we definitely use kilometers only.
Android lied to me
Maybe it's a plot by the Australian government because it led me to set all my devices to Australian English; they're always 100% metric
We use 24 h format here where I live but we speak in 12 h format because it's less awkward. Not all that shines is gold, I guess
If we are doing this, shouldn't we go straight to Kelvin? So we no longer have to deal with negative temperatures
I'd heard of that before so after a quick google America passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975 then in 1982 the Metric Board was abolished by President Ronald Reagan...
So like the harbinger of doom for American progress he was Regan killed it...
We actually got rid of that in Denmark recently, but in a pretty foolish way: our time is now locked in on daylight savings time rather than the original unmodified time.
Probably gonna mean some dark mornings when the times come and we don't switch back, which'll suck for those of us who have a hard time getting out of bed before the sun's up..
Measuring anything in cups can fuck right off. Are we supposed to use expresso cup size? Or big gulp cup size?
If you use the same cup for everything, I doubt that much matters to you at all, though 🤷
Thats the whole point. It doesn't matter, as long as you use the same cup for all the measurements. Imperial recipes are ratios that can be scaled to any cup size.
Or do what most people do and use a measuring cup, standardized size, cheap and available at basically any store.
I was born in the US and have switched by myself. My brother thought I was weird until one day we went to the hardware store.
I needed to buy a 15/64 in drill bit, but they didn't have it. So then we thought, fine, maybe we can use the next closest size...
...
Except WTF is the next size up or down from 15/64??!!! Neither of us could figure it out. Internet wasn't great. Sales people didn't know. We left because we weren't sure what to buy.
In metric, it's trivial. 5mm drill bit, 4mm is smaller, 6mm is bigger.
After this, he stopped thinking I was a weirdo for using metric measurements. But he still uses imperial because murica.
Also, interesting, I learned that he thinks imperial units were invented by the US. I told him they were British units and I stopped caring about British units in 1776, but he didn't seem to believe me.
16/64 is 1/4. Your next size up is a quarter inch. Is it intuitive? Maybe not. Is it really that hard? Only if your educational institutions have also failed you.
Except WTF is the next size up or down from 15/64??!!!
There's lots of great reasons to switch to metric. Inability to do basic fractions isn't one of them...
For the record, it would be 16/64, or, 1/4
Everyone has trouble with something that's basic for someone else - we just have different skills. If these fractions are too confusing for a significant minority of people, then that's a good reason to switch from fractional to decimal.
Except In this specific case, it's about measurements for tools. Fractional is far more practical for construction than decimal for tooling.
To be fair the modern USA is imperialist, we just don't call it that because imperialism is no longer considered a good thing.
tespoons? That's what tsp means?
Yeah what'd you think it meant, Eugene?
...ten square pounds?
Calzone explodes
Jazz music intensifies
When you go at it harder than a trash compactor and your partner literally changes shape.
A square pound is when a guidance counselor who thinks he's still cool goes in for a fist bump and says "pound it "
Please, baking is such a pain in the ass because measurements are never consistent
And everything is measured by volume. Just tell me the amount of salt I need in grams and I don't have to worry about if it's kosher or not.
You technically only need kosher salt if the recipe involves some of kind of fermentation or yeast rise, because the iodine in non-kosher salt will kill the yeast before it can rise.
That’s why making a preferment like poolish is a superior method for any bread recipe. You only add salt once the poolish has finished the leavening process.
But every recipe from the US uses kosher salt, which means their measurements don't match for other salts, but if they gave the weight it wouldn't be an issue. 5g of salt is 5g of salt no matter the size of the crystals, but one teaspoon can be totally different.
Sure it is
You can teaspoon the shit out of everything. 3tsp to a table. 5ml to 15ml. Cut recipes by turning everything into a tablespoon. Need to make 1/2 of something that is already 1/4 cup? That's 16 tbsp to a cup, so you were at 4, now half a 1/4 cup is simply 2 tbsp
For dry shit, get a gram scale and welcome to consistency city
Google assistant has gotten worse and worse but "Hey Google, how many tablespoons are in x" is pretty helpful
Or use DuckDuckGo
Or use the terminal app qalc, which converts and calculates with everything!
Does that plug into assistant speakers?
I'm not a massive fan of it but hands free cooking questions are nice. I use DDG for my browser search
I'm sure some open hardware hacker could get DuckDuckGo or qalc to work through their home-soldered voice-controlled assistant.
But other than that, no. For what it's worth, I spend 2 to 3 seconds for each conversion through the terminal when preparing a recipe, or about 15 seconds unlocking my phone and looking it up in DDG on the spot
Right? Cooking is the single area where the American system makes sense. Much more intuitive and you don't need a kitchen scale.
Using volume is imprecise no matter what units you're using. Not a big deal for cooking, but for baking, you definitely should use a scale.
Cooking is an art. Baking is a science
I was with someone who eyeballed it. Worked out for a skillet. Then she tried to make bread one night. I warned her but it did not go well
Super selfish reason but as an architect in the US, I deal with nice round imperial numbers all day. Door frames, typically 2”. Standard commercial door, 3’x7’. All the codes are based around imperial too. ADA door width, 3’. Masonry Dimension, every 8 inches. At this point, it would be hard to remember that ADA turning radius is 1525 mm (not the easy 5’…. And yes, I know that’s changing to 67” soon). There are literally hundreds of dimensions I would have to relearn. I suppose it’s probably for the best to switch over and rip that bandaid off, but damn, it would be a headache and take me much longer to review drawings in metric (in the short term).
I assume you would also introduce a new standard with rounded numbers, metric doors are also 200x80 cm for example, and sizes of everything gets rounded in the rest of the world, too. Timber sizes differ a little between north america and the rest of the world, it is a different framework, you'd get used to it.
All I think about is how much current tooling in manufacturing is made to use those round imperial measurements, and how much it would cost to convert/change them over. That's possibly the #1 reason why the US will never go metric.
A change like that shouldn't be done over night, you'd need to go double standard for a while, say 10-20 years depending on the sector. That way you can construct 'ansi' buildings while new development is slowly moving to 'iso', and machines get the new specs when replaced. Give a heading and industries will slowly adapt.
True, would just have to get accepted by the ICC and all the state legislatures who approve state wide code. I have a feeling it will be difficult to convince some of the less forward thinking states to accept metric codes that take into account the rounding…. Who knows though. I don’t know a ton about that side of things
Just make your drawing in an imperial template and change the unit display when your done.
That's also great, but unhandy for manual use. Imaging a folder full of files like:
2004-06-14T23:34:30+02:00_funnypic.png
04-06-13_funnypic.png is much better in that regard, but obviously is not that precise.
If you don't butcher it like you did, ISO8601 caters for any amount of precision you need.
For the vast, vast majority of my usage 2023-07-23 is sufficient. If you need a time as well just append the time and the nice thing is it'll still keep things in order (I've not found myself needing to use the timezone notation as well since I don't usually share dates cross-border). For work I use the week notation a lot 2023-W30-4.
04-06-13 is not helpful because now I don't know if you're European and mean 4th of June 2013, or if you're american and mean 6th of April 2013, or if you're some weirdo who means 13th of June 2004.
These are the iso standard timestamps I regularly use in code, which are precise but unhandy. There is no butchering, it's just one of the full standards.
As I said above it's highly unhandy to use the full string. The shortened two digits version is fully sufficient when operating in a controlled environment, because you know what each pair represents. As soon as you go into the great unknown, you can't say for sure what format is used anyway.
What we can definitely agree on, is that a standard process would help a lot, whichever it is. Preferably one that works well with alphabetically sorting.
We are talking about the exakt same thing then. I really like standardized Date formats. They are always pain in programming languages.
Not funnypics but lets say your bills, stuff in your backup:
Gets sorted by name automatically.
I also do because it is ISO standard. I also do 24 hours for time. I wish scheduling application would do that. I don't know how many times I have scheduled a meeting for 8PM the following day instead of 8AM.
The imperial system (of length at least) has a very human basis. An inch is the first joint of your thumb, the foot is your foot, the yard is one step, a stride is two (step left, step right), a mile is 1000 strides. Normal walking speed is about 100 steps a minute, so a mile is about 20 mins of walking
The problem is when they generalized these distances, they apparently used the biggest guy they could find... It still makes sense for rough measurements, but I already use metric for anything small or precise. Or fast - I don't even know what gravity is in imperial units. Kmph isn't natural for me, but I think I could get there...I like 60mph being a mile a minute, it helps me estimate, but i could get over it
Weight and volume? I already use metric for everything but my own weight, because screw that nonsense.
Temperature? I'd like something more human scaled for daily use, I've tried getting used to it but metric just doesn't click the same way. I like how Fahrenheit is roughly the livable range - below 0 is intense even with proper attire, and above 100 is dangerous even if you're adapted to it. It's not perfect, but maybe something like Celsius*2 for easy translation?
Anything not coming into contact with you, like cooking or cpu temp, would be better in Celsius though - things change around 100C
At the end of the day, I think it just makes sense to have more than one unit of measurement for certain things - one for human scale that is easy to grasp based on our bodies, and one for measurement.
It would be nice to say "I need like 10 feet of hose" and they give you 3.5 meters because it's understood it's an estimate, or you say "I need these boards cut to 2.75m" and they know it's a measurement and give it to you exactly that.
And I would not miss it if volume and weights were metric only - i can't tell you how many times I've converted teaspoons to ml or ounces to grams, maybe it's because I learned chemistry before cooking but holy crap is that so much more helpful
